By Dennis S Reina and Michelle L ReinaIn today’s fast-paced and ever-changing workplace, trust is more important than ever. But after two decades of downsizing, restructuring, and managerial changes, trust within organizations is at an all-time low.

An online discussion forum has been launched so people with an interest in the future of local strategic partnerships and other local government issues can feed their views into the final week of consultations on the future of LSPs. The forum is a pilot and its success is being evaluated by the Hansard Society as part of a Department for Constitutional Affairs project looking into the use of information and communication technology by central government.People are being invited to give views on five questions from the consultation and the forum offers them the chance to discuss other LSP-related topics. The forum – Ispforum.net will continue after Friday’s deadline for the consultation as part of the wider e-democracy exercise.

Local authorities are being urged to toughen up over unpaid fines for environmental crimes such as littering and dog fouling. Local Government leaders have responded by saying some smaller authorities need help to tackle non-payers and the cost of court action to recover fines often makes the action wasteful. They claim, though, that all councils will be making improvements when their full powers to issue fixed penalty notices come into force in April.In a speech to the Keep Britain Tidy Campaign’s Cleaner, Safer, Greener conference, Mr. Bradshaw said he was disturbed to discover that of the 20,000 fixed penalty notices issued for littering, dog fouling, graffiti and fly-posting, 8,000 had not been paid. Details of the fixed penalty notices issued in 2004-05 by every local authority are now available on the Defra website.

This document published by ourpartnerships describes how a South London charity provides out-of -hours activities in schools. The Trojans Scheme has 16 partnerships with primary schools, providing a range of out-of-school activities during term time and the holidays. The charity charges the children’s parents for the activities and offers subsidised places for children from deprived backgrounds. It has been praised as a “community catalyst” by think-tank Demos.Trojans started out as a project set up by parents and staff at one primary school and five years ago became an independent charity that now works with 6,000 children. Trojans hopes to have 300 schools partnerships in 12 years’ time.

More support is being given to health and social care schemes that help people with long term conditions to deal with their own health problems enabling them to stay out of hospital. The Department of Health has published a new guide that includes examples of innovative practice.The guide, “Supporting people with long term conditions to self-care” has been produced to help NHS and social care staff to promote self-care following the recent Health White Paper in which a key theme was helping people take control of their own health. The guidance highlights some of the ways that health and social services are supporting self care at a local level. They include monitoring devices, self care skills education and training, support networks and information services and are provided by a range of public, private and voluntary sector agencies.

Almost three quarters of local authorities in England and Wales are actively involved with schools to increase young people’s awareness of democracy, according to a survey by the Local Government Association released today to coincide with the launch of a Local Democracy Campaign.The launch will see Local Democracy Week expanded into a year round campaign to increase young peoples’ awareness that they have the power to shape their community. It aims, too, to make local authorities more relevant to young people by encouraging them to ‘Take Part Take Power’ and to persuade them to see councils as the route to making changes in the places where they live.

By Becca Singh Drawing on the work of four development projects the author set out to find ways to increase the local voice of black and minority ethnic disabled people and carers. The projects found high levels of unmet need, inappropriate and inadequate support services, and experience of discrimination in mainstream service provision. She suggests a framework for future projects which includes recognising the importance of multiple identities that straddle ‘tick boxes’ of ethnicity, heritage, disability, mental health, gender, faith, age, generation, class, family and citizenship status.

Data to support the management of Neighbourhood Renewal programmes can now be accessed from a gateway website. The site is managed by Oxford 7 Consultants for Social Inclusion and it has been developed in partnership
with the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. As a gateway, the site has no data, but gives links to organisation that collect and compile data such asthe departments for health and education.

Ten projects proposed by fifteen councils have been given a share of the 126 million pounds funding from the Local Enterprise Growth Initiative to boost the economies of some of the deprived areas in England. But none of the most
deprived areas, as measured on the Index of Deprivation, were successful in the bidding process. The Institute for Public Policy Research’s Centre for Cities believes that the bidding process is flawed, with success going to
those councils with the skills to put together the best bids. This is shown in Greater London, where the bidding process resulted in Croydon, with a score on 2 in the Deprivation Index winning, while Tower Hamlets which
scores 6, was unsuccessful.

By Rikke Berg and Nirmala RaoLocal governments throughout the west are undergoing a transformation of their leadership styles and structures. Some countries have abandoned traditional systems of collective or committee based decision-making in favour of Cabinet models or, more radically, a directly-elected executive mayor, while others have strengthened existing mayoral systems. There are a few exceptions to this trend. Based on original research in eleven countries the book assesses these changes in terms of their implications for political accountability, the role of lay politicians, political recruitment, the professionalization of leadership, and relations with the bureaucracy.